1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a diagnosis supporting apparatus which performs an image processing for supporting diagnosis on an endoscopic image of a living tissue, and a control method of the diagnosis supporting apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, endoscopes have been widely used in medical fields, and such endoscopes are configured to be capable of picking up an image of a living mucosa and the like of an inner wall of a digestive tract by inserting an insertion portion into a body cavity such as the digestive tract, and displaying the picked-up image as an endoscopic image.
In addition, research has been carried out regarding an image processing for supporting diagnosis using running patterns of blood vessels under a living mucosa and an epithelium (or epithelial tissue) in an endoscopic image picked up with an endoscope.
On the other hand, the prior art example in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 9-251535 discloses an image processing method used with respect to medical image data acquired by a breast X-ray photograph (mammogram), wherein a pixel at which the vector intensity of gray level gradient is maximal is searched for in each of a plurality of search directions which are radially spread from an arbitrary pixel to peripheral pixels, a feature value related to gray level gradient is calculated from the vector intensity of gray level gradient and an amount of angle difference between the vector direction and the search direction at each of the searched plurality of pixels, and based on the feature value, pattern detection for determining whether or not the arbitrary pixel is included in a predetermined pattern is performed. This prior example provides a detection method for detecting an image of microcalcification with high accuracy in order to support early detection of a breast cancer.
A living mucosa as a normal tissue in the stomach and the like has microvessels running so as to formulate a honeycomb-shaped network. On the other hand, a living mucosa of a lesion part such as a living mucosa of a neoplastic lesional tissue changes to have a structure or a shape which is deviated or different from the honeycomb-shaped network of a normal living mucosa.